This Bridge Called My BAck

This Bridge Called My Back - writings by radical women of color Edited by Cherríe L.Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa Expanded and Revised Third Edition, published by Third Woman Press

This Bridge Called My Back - writings by radical women of color, is an anthology that two decades ago, called for 'a radical restructuring of this country' [ie the United States of America]. On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, Cherríe Moraga began her task of composing the foreword to the book's third edition. The bombing of America's World Trade Centre reminded her of the extent to which invasion and terrorism have, for five centuries, been a part life for Third World people living in America, and in her essay she reflects that although the September Eleventh attacks shattered for the white residents of that country, their illusions of safety within its borders, that for the residents of colour, such illusions had rarely even existed. She draws analogies too, between the way that white middle-class American life style is lived, both on a national level and on an international one at the expense of people of colour, and she reiterates her plea of twenty years earlier, that the United States must cure itself of its racism and its sexism so that it can grow into wholeness.

This widely acclaimed and ground-breaking anthology comprises various sections of such dense and such diverse writing - poetry, free prose, academic essay - that I found it impossible to condense my thoughts about it into the few words of a book review. It includes the current, the 1983 and the 1981 forewords, prefaces and introductions. It contains also, a number of colour and monochrome reproductions of resistance, protest and subversive artwork from the 1970's that are intended as more 'words' for the reader to mull over (with a little help from Celia Herrera Rodríguez's explanatory curatorial statement.) So one can look at and learn some background to images of protest such as Betye Saar's 'The Liberation of Aunt Jemima' (a black nanny depicted with squalling white babe tucked under one arm whilst she brandishes a large gun in the other hand) or the energisingly subversive depiction of Yolanda López's 'Portrait of the Artist as the Virgen de Guadalupe.'

Some of the contributors to the original edition such as Audre Lorde are not alive today to witness the far reaching changes that both the book and they, wrought in feminist thought. They might have agreed however, that although twenty years ago, the philosophy of this book may have been encapsulated in these words from Kate Rushin's The Bridge Poem: 'The bridge I must be / Is the bridge to my own power', (lxvii) that in the new millennium, the writings might now serve better to reinforce Gloria Anzaldúa's hope, as expressed in her foreword to the third edition, that 'May our voices proclaim the bonds of bridges.' (xxxix)

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